Woman Gives Birth in Hallway of Los Angeles Courthouse
LOS ANGELES, April 3 (UPI) — A Los Angeles woman visiting the downtown courthouse to pay a fine ended up giving birth to a baby boy in a first floor hallway.
Ambermarie Irving-Elkins said her baby was two days overdue and labor had started Thursday, but the contractions were 15 minutes apart so she thought she had timeto stop by the Stanley Mosk Courthouse to pay a fine.
Irving-Elkins said she was walking in the hallway at the courthouse when she realized the baby was coming sooner than she had thought.
“That one contraction where you know it’s about to happen hit me and I went down to my knees and — he was coming,” Irving-Elkins told CBS Los Angeles.
Deputy Marquette Oliver was one of the courthouse workers who rushed to help the mother.
“She pulls her trousers down and I looked and went ‘Oh my God, it’s the head,'” Oliver told KTLA-TV. “I got down on my knees. I caught the baby’s head and the baby just slid out.”
“Once he was born, everyone was clapping and cheering. There must have been 50 people in the hallway at that time. It was crazy,” Irving-Elkins said.
Irving-Elkins and her husband, Nom, dubbed the newborn Malachi Amani Elkins.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Special Enforcement Bureau tweeted a picture of the mother and newborn from just after the birth.
